Macplaymate: Is It Software Or Hard Porn?

At a Los Angeles bridal shower, it brought shudders of repugnance. ''I have to leave the room,'' said one appalled guest.

In a meeting room at a Silicon Valley computer firm, it left a group of men ''giggling and hiding the computer'' when a woman executive walked in unexpectedly.

At a San Francisco computer trade show, it brought out the vice squad -- and a 10-deep ''feeding frenzy'' of men frantically waving wads of money, ''begging'' to buy it.

In the idiom of computer programming, an image created on the screen is called a graphic. And for this program in particular, the word is precisely correct.

Its name: MacPlaymate. Its game: ''interactive erotica,'' a sexually explicit computer game designed for the Apple Macintosh computer.

There is no way to describe MacPlaymate delicately -- which is entirely the point, say a group of Los Angeles women who argue that such programs are inappropriate for the workplace and most every place else.

With its vivid graphics and participatory pseudosex, MacPlaymate takes exploitation light-years beyond X-rated videos and nude pinups, they say, and gives a new urgency to the debate over pornography's role in promoting violence against women.

For the less than computer literate, ''interactive'' means the operator is no passive observer but takes part in directing what happens on the screen.

In MacPlaymate, the user summons an animated rendering of a woman, ''Maxie,'' who flutters her Theda Bara eyelids, moves her mouth, breasts, legs and hands and entices the user into the program.

A user can strip Maxie garment by garment, force her to engage in a variety of sex acts, some with another woman or with any of six devices from a ''toy box.'' They can gag, handcuff and shackle her at her spike-heel-shod ankles.

As an added treat, the program has digitized sound: a woman's voice, in tinny gasps, moans ''Oh!'' And a ''panic'' button calls up on the screen ''a real-looking pseudospreadsheet that looks like you're working, like if . . . your boss comes over to your desk,'' marvels Dave, a computer consultant to several Los Angeles high-tech firms who asked that his last name not be used. The program is not authorized or condoned by Apple, which has sold more than 2 million computers worldwide, many of them in offices and academic settings. Nor is it approved by Playboy, which sent off a stern letter to MacPlaymate's Connecticut address, at which the final ''E'' was dropped from the name MacPlaymate, rendering it technically MacPlaymat.

In fact, MacroMind, the Chicago multimedia company whose animation technology enabled MacPlaymate to be created -- without MacroMind's knowledge or consent -- reached an agreement with MacPlaymate's creator: Some of the profits from every MacPlaymate, which sold for $20 to $50, are donated to the Chicago Abused Women Coalition.

And so far, about $1,000 has reached their coffers.

''We don't condone it at all,'' said MacroMind spokeswoman Brenda Ketter. ''The only real viable solution to something like that is to fight back against it in the most gracious way possible.

''It's so much exploitation,'' she said, ''especially with a tool the computer that is supposed to be so high-end and such a great process. . . . Even that's getting degraded.''

For every MacPlaymate sold, scores were copied free. It is ''probably the most pirated program'' on the Macintosh, says Frank Brooks, president of a Connecticut computer company.

Many men who have seen it variously describe it as a ''novelty and a curiosity . . . gimmicky . . . funny . . . a one-line joke . . . a general recreational piece of software.''

To most, it is a roguish bit of high-tech whimsy, created to show off just what a computer can do, and as ''a parody on pornography,'' says Brooks, who knows the designer.

(The designer, now living in Northern California, did not return repeated calls from the Los Angeles Times.)

But the Los Angeles advertising executive who hopes to banish such programs says that ''in our office, we call it MacRape.''

Something of an underground legend since it appeared nearly two years ago, MacPlaymate hit a higher profile only lately. Ad executive Prudence Baird learned of it from a lighthearted item in Vogue magazine about its ''user- friendly'' program.

Then she and her co-workers, who showed it at the bridal shower to ''find out what we're up against,'' heard to their distress that many men who have seen the program think it is no big deal.

Computer sexual images of women are not new. Pirated Playboy photos are sent through computer scanners onto ''bulletin boards'' often accessible to kids.

Sex sells: Photos of women in see-through shirts are used to persuade prospective male buyers of the screen's qualities.

Some argue, then, that a program like MacPlaymate is simply the inevitable union of society's fascination with technology and obsession with sex.